A picture of Adnan Syed when he was 16 years old and playing varsity football.
Photograph: Jonathan Hanson/Syed family

A little over a week ago, a mysterious post cropped up on the still-active Serial subreddit. “Announcement,” it read. “I am releasing all the burial photos on October 13.” The user claimed to have obtained grisly evidence photos that would show the body of Hae Min Lee, the victim in the case that the Serial podcast covered so grippingly last year.

The post, which was quickly deleted by community moderators, could have been made by a troll or a sock puppet. Possibly whoever wrote it never had the pictures at all. But it was just another day in the extensive, labyrinthine post-Serial obsessive universe online, still a surprisingly active and raucous place where people can argue and collaborate with strangers who are still stuck on the story.

It’s been a year since the podcast debuted and became an international obsession. But on Reddit, Facebook and several podcasts, communities of people are still dedicated to getting to the bottom of the story of its first season: the case against Adnan Syed, who was convicted in 2000 of the murder of Lee. The prosecution had successfully argued that Syed killed Lee, a former girlfriend, in a fit of rage. For years, the case had lain dormant. Then, Rabia Chaudry, a family friend to the Syeds, brought it to Sarah Koenig. The rest was viral history.

By the time Koenig signed off the podcast last year, she and the Serial team had managed to poke serious holes in the prosecution’s theory of the case. She didn’t fully resolve the matter of Syed’s guilt or innocence, though she said she didn’t think she would have convicted him. Everything the Serial team knew about the crime, she said, amounted to a “beginning”. They didn’t get the full story of what had happened to Hae Min Lee.

The Serial team seems to have been content to leave it there. A request for comment from the Serial team about whether they considered themselves to still be involved in Syed’s story had not been returned at press time. But they have, in recent weeks, announced a number of new Serial projects not focused on Syed’s case, including a television show and a possible second season topic in the case of Bowe Bergdahl.

Chaudry, the woman who brought the story to Koenig, is disappointed that the Serial team appears to have lost interest. She told the Guardian that in both her and Syed’s most recent conversations with Koenig, she had said that she wasn’t really paying attention to any new developments in Syed’s case.

“I don’t know how to take it,” Chaudry said. “There are a number of ways you can read into that, none of them good.”

Chaudry’s co-hosts are a law professor named Colin Miller and an attorney named Susan Simpson. Miller and Simpson started out as casual listeners of the podcast. But participating in the varied online discussions on forums like Reddit and their own personal blogs, they gradually became leading investigative figures.

While Miller and Simpson haven’t themselves spoken to Syed, they both consider themselves in some way advocates for his innocence. “It’s hard not to become invested in a case,” Miller said by email.

“With a criminal defendant, the difficulty is that you almost never know whether they are actually innocent or guilty. That said, I am convinced at this point that there was serious legal injustice that resulted in a teenager being given a life sentence.”

The audience for Undisclosed, while not Serial-sized, is impressive. According to AudioBoom, the podcast’s 11 episodes have been listened to 37m times. “It’s way more than we expected,” Chaudry said. “I expected maybe 100,000 per episode. Especially because we’re not as easy to consume as Serial.”

I am convinced that there was serious legal injustice that resulted in a teenager being given a life sentence

Colin Miller

Indeed, Undisclosed sounds quite different from Serial. There are few narrative flourishes, and the production value fluctuates. Undisclosed is obsessed with the smaller details of the case, things Koenig either didn’t catch or was unwilling to speculate about on air. The smaller things the show has turned up have been helping Syed’s legal team.

For example, there’s the “AT&T cover sheet”, which Miller found as he was perusing the documents on the case. Much of the case against Syed is predicated on cell phone evidence. The prosecution’s key witness, Jay Wilds, testified that he had gone with Syed to Leakin Park to dispose of Lee’s body, and cell tower pings near the area seemed to confirm that.

Adnan Syed, 16, sits with his brother, Tanveer, 21, shortly before he was sent to prison Photograph: Jonathan Hanson/Commissioned for The Guardian

But this cover sheet – a relic of the age when everyone communicated by fax – shows that even when AT&T provided the evidence to the prosecution, it did so with a heavy caution: “Outgoing calls only are reliable for location status. Any incoming calls will NOT be considered reliable information for location.” The AT&T cover sheet has now been included with some of Syed’s legal filings.

A tip from a listener also turned Undisclosed’s attention to the involvement of Crimestoppers in this case. In 1999, Crimestoppers paid out a $3,075 reward for a tip in the case to an unknown person. If that reward turns out to have been paid to a key witness like Jay Wilds, or anyone else deeply involved in the case, a whole host of consequences may come into play, as it’s considered legally relevant that someone was compensated for providing information leading to an arrest. Undisclosed is continuing to burrow into the issue but they don’t know yet who received the reward.

Chaudry, Simpson, and Miller have dug up a lot of interesting anecdotes and made several interesting hypotheses, but so far they have no facts. Speculation or not, the continuing interest still seems to reach the major stakeholders in the Serial case. Jay Wilds himself, as it happens, has spoken to a different Serial spin-off podcast called Serial Dynasty.

Serial Dynasty’s host is a man named Bob Ruff, whose day job, improbably, is as fire chief of North Berrien fire rescue in Coloma, Michigan. Ruff is a kind of podcast addict; he heard about Serial from another podcast host, then started listening, then got hooked. Ruff sometimes investigates arson, and he clearly likes the thrill of the chase.

His style is extremely digressive, each episode a kind of fractal speculation. (Commenters on the internet frequently complain about the length of the episodes.) But Ruff has a mellifluous radio voice, and his manner is evidently appealing, because even his spin-off-of-a-spin-off podcast has about 160,000 listeners.

And one of them is Wilds. Ruff had tried several times to contact Wilds over the past few months. And more than a month ago, Wilds finally responded. He did not say much to Ruff, but at one point, in a clear effort to persuade Wilds to be interviewed, Ruff told him that he thought that if Syed was ever exonerated, Wilds would be a “target”.

This was a (perhaps inadvertently) poignant remark. Wilds’ involvement in the entire Serial frenzy has always been as an unwilling figure, central to the story but dragged in only against his will. Unwilling to go on air with Koenig, but central to the case, the online detectives – the ones of the sort who might conceivably get photos of Lee’s corpse for themselves and post them online in the name of “investigation” – basically stalked him. His identity was swiftly dug out. On Reddit, they analyzed his Facebook page. They pulled his criminal records.

And yet, though Bob Ruff told me in an email his impression was that Wilds hadn’t been listening to Serial Dynasty specifically, he has to be aware of how all this speculation is closing in on him.

Whether it’s the matter of the CrimeStoppers tip, or questions over the fact that his story has been so consistently inconsistent, he’s going to keep being confronted by this ravenous appetite for continuing to dig into something that in another world would have been forgotten. And the sheer number of people who are still, in Koenig’s absence, following the story to whatever conclusion it reaches, must be hard to avoid.